Anyone who's ever worked in a small business has had the experience of dealing with "the guy who's good with computers" who has gotten in over his head. The person who is in charge of most IT related functions in a firm, from patching operating systems to installing software, to managing the network policy and providing support to all the users on a network.

It's even worse when the size of the user base grows beyond ten or so people; at that point, you've got need for someone who's got dedicated network training. As the network grows in complexity, the more staff you'll need to keep it running in tip top condition.

Getting properly trained network administrators can be a hiring nightmare. The skills are in high demand, there are a lot of people who are paper-certified out there who sound like they can do the job in the interview, but are desperately mining through the manuals to handle the basics. If you have the luxury of experienced staff, you can have them tasked with training new network operators and administrators. If you don't, you may want to invest in significant network training for your existing staff.

Network training courses can be had in most professional development centres; another excellent source for you to look at is the company that architected and installed your network initially. They know the ins and outs of your network, and have the requirement documentation to train people on what's going on.

Network training is also useful to people who work at a lower level than just the network administrators. Teaching one or two people in each department the low level basics of network diagnostics can be a long term cost benefit to your company, as they can be tasked with solving some of the very basic problems on the spot. That being said, there are different courses and different levels of training for the staff you've got, whether they're new engineers being brought up to speed, or talented ones who may need to handle internal architecture adjustments.

Typical training programmes for network engineers start with basic concepts, such as managing user accounts and privilege levels, setting up, monitoring and regulating network shares, and configuring the basic network aware applications that a business needs to run on, such as calendaring applications and email, and regulating access to the Internet. They can quickly escalate from there to security policy generation and implementation, basic and advanced troubleshooting, and maintaining uptime.

Most vendors who sell network training have flexible training schedules, often with classes on nights and weekends. Most also teach a certain mode of thinking – a diagnostic approach. The truth of the matter is that every network engineer out there has to spend time looking things up; anyone who claims he can do this all from what's in his head is either very skilled, or trying to impress you to cover for his lack of experience. What you want to encourage is a mindset like a good doctor trying to make a diagnosis, and that takes more than rote learning, it takes a true understanding of the subject matter.